Kanal

Synopsis

September, 1944. It's the 56th day of Warsaw's uprising against the Nazis. The third Platoon of the Resistance is down to 43 heroic men and women, and they're penned in. After a last day of fighting, and of good-byes to family, to love making, and to music, a handful of doomed survivors wade into the city's underground sewers in hopes of escape. Their valor is tested a final time.

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The 2nd act in Wajda's war trilogy portrays a close and personal account with the WWII events in Warsaw, Poland in 1944. It chronicles the last days of the uprising and of what little fight and numbers the Polish resistance had left against the Germans.

'Kanal' much like the Russian WWII film 'Come and See' borders on being a horror film in many aspects. Its close up view of the atrocities of war feels like an absurdist nightmare that one can never escape. Men accept their forthcoming death while others can no longer hold onto their sanity. All witness murder and despair that even closing ones eyes can not rest ones mind from the horrors in the reality they live…

After finishing the hella-cool Ashes & Diamonds, recommended to me by one of you, I knew that Andrzej Wajda was a director that I needed to acquaint myself with. I soon found out that Ashes was the final part in his very loosely titled War Trilogy coming after Kanal and A Generation. The only thing that these three films have in common is that they take place during WWII only at different times with A Generation taking place in 1942 and Ashes taking place on the very last day of the war.

Here we have Kanal taking place in September of 1944. What is considered to be the first film of the Warsaw Uprising; Kanal takes a look at a platoon…

An unrelenting and harrowing depiction of the horrors of war. Kanal is rather straight-forward and only 95 minutes long, but in that time it presents a fleshed-out, human ensemble of characters and also brings us right into the center of all the madness. Though there are small doses of humor, for almost an hour Wajda takes the viewer down to the steamy, filthy and claustrophobic underground, to a fucking hell of a sewer that also works as a metaphor for the darkness of war. Hopelessness, dread and disorientation engulfs nearly every frame, its beautifully shot. The final note is tragic. I need a shower.

I find Kanal a sad and draining film from start to finish. The Warsaw Uprisings of 1944 remain an ambiguous event. The goals of the Allies were never clearly articulated. For Poland the liberation of Warsaw was as much about its position during the coming post-war reconstruction as about the defeat of Germany. Warsaw wanted to be in a place of strength in which to negotiate rule by the London based government in exile rather than Soviet Russia. But the expected support from the Red Army never materialized - whether this was because Stalin wanted potential Polish opponents to the expanded Soviet Empire defeated by the German Army; or simply because the Russian Army could not offer effective support from…

40 minutes of a ramshackle group of Polish resistance soldiers' parting declarations of love, telephone calls to Nazi controlled areas, shacking up one last time, and 50 minutes of losing minds in the sewers beneath the Nazis feet trying to escape. It's a last ditch effort. An escape through the bowels. The stench and lack of air and water make them hallucinate; some quote Dante, some forget their names, some remember their wife and children, some remember enough to seek light to the bitter end, and one won't leave anyone behind after it's already become every soldier for themselves. Even though Kanal begins with a declaration that we're watching a batch of people of which none will survive, Andrzej Wajda…

Harrowing and damn right oppressive, ‘Kanal’ conjures such a terror inducing atmosphere, one of which the majority of horror films fail to merely echo its sense of sheer desperation and claustrophobia. A masterpiece that has truly stood the test of time.

What an exhausting experience, a brutally scathing descent into the warsaw uprising in which a company of resistance fighters find themselves desperately escaping Nazi occupation through Mokotow’s sewer system; in other words, hell itself. Stylistically restrainted but beautifully shot, Kanal is a devastating fight for survival within a time in which war had ravaged everything these people had ever loved or cared for, their one and only daily goal is to survive and move on. Often distressing to watch but it never once loses its visceral power.

This film is absolutely begging for a fresh new transfer, Criterion please?

Kanal is one of the best war film ever made. Wajda eliminated glorified heroism, in exchange he showed us how "human" are, in the sense of Italian neorealism, behaved amidst chaos and mayhem. Even though the tragic denouement is more or less announced at the very beginning of the film by an anonymous narrator, the hope of survival is still vigorously palpable via the characters’ countless struggle. The film is nonetheless pessimistic and poignant, but utterly convincing. The contrast between light (the exit, hence the hope) and darkness (the "gas" filled, trap-set, murky sewer), and the catastrophic space inside the sewer incessantly evoked a sense of restlessness; alongside with the resistance we could experience their tension and exhaustion, witness their…

As much as this is a "war is hell" type of movie (Oliver Stone's Platoon is essentially a remake of this, with the melodrama and soap opera ratcheted up to 11), there's a stark difference between the way Europeans and American view war and this film brought it into full view for me. It's one I enjoyed not because of the tropes it clearly worked on originating in inferior movies made more recently, but because of the casual way most of the soldiers of this doomed platoon go about their business, knowing they're about to die.

It's not treated with any kind of emotion beyond resignation and acceptance. No one is expressing high intensity emotion the way we see American…

Next to Come and See and Rome Year Zero, probably the most crushing portrait of WWII I’ve seen. There is no glorification or fetishization of war. Just a clear depiction of how it strips people of their humanity and leaves destruction in its wake.